Unions Under Threat

Oct. 30, 2015

To the Editor

In your editorial lauding the latest auto union pact (“Auto Workers Point the Way to Higher Pay,” Oct. 26), you correctly point out the social benefit of unions’ being able to effectively threaten a strike and halt the downward spiral to the bottom of wages being earned by working and middle-class Americans.

Real wages are flat or have declined for nearly a generation. The purpose of trade unionism for a hundred years in this country has been to extract more money for the workers from employers who can afford to pay.

The right wing’s agenda of expanding state “right to work” laws and the threatened possibility that right to work will be imposed by an ultraconservative Supreme Court on the public sector has only one purpose: to financially weaken unions and continue the destruction of the middle class.

Because union membership has declined so precipitously since President Ronald Reagan destroyed the airline traffic controllers union in the early 1980s for having the temerity to strike, it is now more important than ever for people to honor workers’ picket lines because they fight not only for themselves but also for the rest of us.